I remember growing up and hearing about Acapulco in terms of the getaway for others. Kind of an embedded notion just hanging around in the brain. Certainly, my family experienced Acapulco through the lens of "Fun in Acapulco" starring Elvis Presely who incidentally was played by a stunt double in Mexico, Elvis got only as close as the Hollywood soundstage. Pass the sixties and into the seventies Acapulco still a jewel on the Mexican Riveira. Welcome the resorts in Quintana Roo and Puerto Vallarta and Cabos. Acapulco becomes weather worn and no longer the hot spot. Today Acapulco is in the news for hurricanes and cartels and now extortion. You gotta love "extortion". No resume needed. Field is open to all to join or be a victim of.
I didn't realize that it was Elvis' stunt double that had all the fun. Acapulco has that feel of the glory days long ago; although if you are a gangster loving reggaeton the are happening now. No resume necessary!
I pause to think.....what would my cultural label be today? Reggaeton aside I would tip my cowboy hat to gangster loving Outlaw Texas. Been there done that and still do to a bunch of CrashOut target topics. Today I give a shout out to my father, J. Goldman. 100 years old. Battle of the Bulge. The culture wars. The drug wars up front and personal through me. In 1973 while I was away in the service I was told he flushed an entire LB (a pound of Acapulco Gold, we called it whatever was cool at the time) in a fit of paranoid response. Today we go celebrate, with him!
I wish the Hollywood and media types who love portraying big-shot bosses and gunmen would spend 1% as much time portraying the ordinary victims who are forced to pay for the right to do an honest day's work.
Yeah, totally. It's so demoralizing for hard working people to have to pay these quotas and live under this fear. The drug trade is very hard to change - but these shakedowns should not be tolerated and can be stopped.
The Mexican government, at all levels, from the local government to the state government and to the Federal government , along with it's enforcement agencies, are responsible for this criminal extortion and protection rackets. Yes this can definitely be stopped but there has been no concerted effort to continue any operation that can destroy this criminal act that is a cancer raging through the economic fabric of the country. Is it because corruption is so pervasive in every sector of the government? Is it because this is a government waging class warfare against the very victims of the extortion who are poor and the schools that have been closed are in poorer districts? If this criminality is not annihilated and stamped into the ground, then the only possible solutions for Mexico will be a Duterte or Bukele solution which will involve massive violence and incarceration. This is not a problem that cannot be solved nor is it a problem that is inevitable to continue. There are examples of solutions that have worked all around the world and believe it or not even in the United States in battling the Mafia extortion and protection rackets in some of America's biggest cities.
In El Salvador, the sugar industry joined forces with the National Police providing money and other resources so that there could be more patrols around their businesses. The industry provided radios, motorbikes, trucks and housing for the patrols. They also provided money for guns and ammunition. These efforts were successful in combating extortion and protection rackets around the sugar industries businesses and protecting their workers.
In Honduras, there was an information exchange between anti-extortion police units and big businesses in Honduras to combat extortion. It worked well for the businesses but corruption maybe the reason why it worked so well for the big businesses. It is likely that the businesses bribed the police units to protect them because there were no anti-extortion campaigns conducted by the police units for the benefit of the general public. The result of this corruption was extortion attacks increased against the general public. Developing information exchanges with big businesses has to be expanded to the general public to truly combat extortion.
In Italy, many businesses, big and small, refused to complain about the extortion payments they had to pay. They just did not trust the police to protect them. Once police started going to each business and expanding patrols and even assigning officers to businesses as protection, trust was created to the point where communities were willing to refuse to pay the extortion demands and provided key information to the police, who immediately arrested the extortion criminals. Special legislation was created to lengthen prison sentences for extortion criminals and the police were extremely exuberant in their physical handling of potential suspects.
In Greece, the police created special anti-extortion squads who operated at night and were very successful in destroying the criminal extortion networks. Immediate physical response by the squads made it known that extortion would not be tolerated.
In Karachi, Pakistan, the police, armed with the intelligence provided by the victims of extortion, the criminals involved in these crimes were dealt with in the most severe fashion, they were shot dead. Extortion immediately disappeared from those districts.
In the United States, extortion and protection rackets, were stopped in many areas of US cities by police patrols day and night, Federal efforts in bribing various Mafia families to quit the extortion racket and turning their heads away from gambling and drug dealing and specialized anti-extortion officers who were specialists in every type of endeavor that would destroy the criminal extortion rackets. The RICO act aided in wiping out the wealth and possessions of the Mafia families involved in extortion crime. The police patrols were very effective for the ordinary citizen.
Many countries around the world were successful in organizing special anti-extortion squads, who were able to develop the trust needed for the necessary intelligence to be provided to them by victims of the extortion. Any corruption by the squads resulted immediately in a break of that trust. Members of the squads were intensely vetted and charges of corruption were immediately investigated.
Mexico has no excuses. Every class of people in Mexico deserve the protection and large corporations have to begun involved in supporting anti-extortion efforts with money and resources, also including the Federal government. A show of force now and then will not solve this problem at all. It can be combatted with a genuine expansions of anti-extortion police units and long term protection plans for all the victims of extortion. Corruption is the real ugly head and the government has to get their head out of their ass when their only solution to combat this crime is a cashless society. Because extortion is a social cancer it can grow into a problem that can only be solved by massive societal violence. If the problem is continually ignored, then the Duterte/Bukele solution will be the only solution capable to destroying this cancer.
Great intervention here, and you are ahead of the game of where I am going with the series, what the experience is in other countries and how Mexico has failed to stop this. A big point indeed is corruption, and agreed if they keep on failing to provide security then eventually people could turn to a strongman who will deliver. Great incites into Greece, Pakistan, Italy and other places here.
Fully agree. Mexico is at a tipping point and if the government doesn’t frontally eliminate these people, then only a strongman like Bukele would be able to do something — along with all the rights trampling, corruption, and dictator delusion that would accompany it.
I think Bukele has already changed the game of what governments can do - like the way that the Mexican government transferred cartel bosses into U.S. custody without an extradition process - but I hope Mexico can resolve this problem without getting to that level of mass incarceration...
I mean, most people care much more about individual safety than freedom of press, but it's sad that over there they were so inept that a dictator had to rescue them.
I think Mexico has enough talent and brainpower to come up with a solution, but too many incompetent and spineless people have been in power for so long that now I'm unsure if there's a way without getting to the extremes.
great article. My uncle had a house in the hills above Acapulco. I visited it once. It has an absolutely beautiful view of the bay. It seemed like paradise. However, with the increase in crime, he stopped going. He wanted to sell it, but couldn't get a price he wanted, because there were no buyers, so he donated it to charity. From what I hear Puerto Vallarta, Tulum, and even Cabo are now having foreigners abandon them slowly as they become the new Acapulcos.
Yeah, Tulum has been a disaster the last cuppa of years. Puerto Vallarta is heavily gangster but I think the cartel there at least keeps it calm and Cabos is a bit more shielded. But they are all vulnerable and Acapulco needs to be a warning sign. Hope your uncle at least had some good times in that house back in the day!
As for Elvis' Hollywood version of Acapulco, circa 1963 (After watching the clip linked below, it's clear the "King" shamelessly ripped off "Jalisco" for the melody of "his" song. Now THAT surely was a crime!) :
Hits close to home, literally. I did look at how Harfuch's strategies differ to counter cartel BS depending on which cartel, what area, and their particular activity specialty. Fascinating. Not a "one size fits all" approach at all!
During the first 25 years of my life or so I would go with my family to Acapulco at least three times a year. I have family there. It is a gorgeous place, and my all-time favorite city. It breaks my heart that such a pearl can be left to rot under the siege of a group of young, violent, angry men with no morals — as if tropical incompetence and corruption weren’t enough. Damn guerrerenses, they ruined Guerrero.
Yeah, it is crazy how so few people can fuck things up for so many - although it takes a weak corrupt state to allow that to happen. I am glad you have great memories from there and hope there will be some more to come.
What’s your take on how the damage done by hurricanes Otis and Erick along with the AMLO admin’s response has made all of this worse?
I know some that have complained about the scrapping of the natural disaster fund and because of that people were more or less getting paid enough to leave instead of areas being rebuilt. The criminals likely enjoy having plenty of abandoned buildings to use for nefarious purposes too.
Yeah, I probably should have got into the hurricanes as well, at least in a mention. They really hammered the city and made things a lot worse, and yeah the gangs certainly took advantage of that, including in organized looting during the disaster.
A friend was there for a conference and was staying in the Princess Mundo Imperial when Otis hit. I have no idea how they didn’t end up in the central lobby with all the other furniture.
Ioan, once again you have handed me a plot for a Detective Emilia Cruz novel. You touched on a crucial point, which is recruitment. The poorest neighborhoods, so far from the glitz and money of the bay hotels, are an endless source of new recruits and social connections are already in place. Garcia Harfuch can't just arrest, he has to replace the recruitment cycle with economic alternatives.
That will be one to look out for! Yep, they need the carrot and the stick both to be working to break the cycle - and it takes a change of mentality for those recruits to want to work and not go for the temptation of the gang life...
It seems like recruiting has been impacted though? There is so much talk and evidence of forced recruitment by the CJNG and Sinaloans that it seems like the cartels are having trouble hiring. Otherwise they wouldn't have to coerce and force so many young men into their ranks!
Very good point. However, it can be different to a guy wanting to be a gang member and making money selling drugs or just taking cash from a business (plenty of recruits for that) to someone going to fight in a crazy battlefield where there is very high chance of dying (throw in the forced recruits there...).
I remember growing up and hearing about Acapulco in terms of the getaway for others. Kind of an embedded notion just hanging around in the brain. Certainly, my family experienced Acapulco through the lens of "Fun in Acapulco" starring Elvis Presely who incidentally was played by a stunt double in Mexico, Elvis got only as close as the Hollywood soundstage. Pass the sixties and into the seventies Acapulco still a jewel on the Mexican Riveira. Welcome the resorts in Quintana Roo and Puerto Vallarta and Cabos. Acapulco becomes weather worn and no longer the hot spot. Today Acapulco is in the news for hurricanes and cartels and now extortion. You gotta love "extortion". No resume needed. Field is open to all to join or be a victim of.
I didn't realize that it was Elvis' stunt double that had all the fun. Acapulco has that feel of the glory days long ago; although if you are a gangster loving reggaeton the are happening now. No resume necessary!
I pause to think.....what would my cultural label be today? Reggaeton aside I would tip my cowboy hat to gangster loving Outlaw Texas. Been there done that and still do to a bunch of CrashOut target topics. Today I give a shout out to my father, J. Goldman. 100 years old. Battle of the Bulge. The culture wars. The drug wars up front and personal through me. In 1973 while I was away in the service I was told he flushed an entire LB (a pound of Acapulco Gold, we called it whatever was cool at the time) in a fit of paranoid response. Today we go celebrate, with him!
I raise a glass to your father. The century! All the way through.
que vive chalino!
Vive!
and yes, a tip o' the sombrero a el sr. goldman!
Raise the hat there!
I wish the Hollywood and media types who love portraying big-shot bosses and gunmen would spend 1% as much time portraying the ordinary victims who are forced to pay for the right to do an honest day's work.
Yeah, totally. It's so demoralizing for hard working people to have to pay these quotas and live under this fear. The drug trade is very hard to change - but these shakedowns should not be tolerated and can be stopped.
The Mexican government, at all levels, from the local government to the state government and to the Federal government , along with it's enforcement agencies, are responsible for this criminal extortion and protection rackets. Yes this can definitely be stopped but there has been no concerted effort to continue any operation that can destroy this criminal act that is a cancer raging through the economic fabric of the country. Is it because corruption is so pervasive in every sector of the government? Is it because this is a government waging class warfare against the very victims of the extortion who are poor and the schools that have been closed are in poorer districts? If this criminality is not annihilated and stamped into the ground, then the only possible solutions for Mexico will be a Duterte or Bukele solution which will involve massive violence and incarceration. This is not a problem that cannot be solved nor is it a problem that is inevitable to continue. There are examples of solutions that have worked all around the world and believe it or not even in the United States in battling the Mafia extortion and protection rackets in some of America's biggest cities.
In El Salvador, the sugar industry joined forces with the National Police providing money and other resources so that there could be more patrols around their businesses. The industry provided radios, motorbikes, trucks and housing for the patrols. They also provided money for guns and ammunition. These efforts were successful in combating extortion and protection rackets around the sugar industries businesses and protecting their workers.
In Honduras, there was an information exchange between anti-extortion police units and big businesses in Honduras to combat extortion. It worked well for the businesses but corruption maybe the reason why it worked so well for the big businesses. It is likely that the businesses bribed the police units to protect them because there were no anti-extortion campaigns conducted by the police units for the benefit of the general public. The result of this corruption was extortion attacks increased against the general public. Developing information exchanges with big businesses has to be expanded to the general public to truly combat extortion.
In Italy, many businesses, big and small, refused to complain about the extortion payments they had to pay. They just did not trust the police to protect them. Once police started going to each business and expanding patrols and even assigning officers to businesses as protection, trust was created to the point where communities were willing to refuse to pay the extortion demands and provided key information to the police, who immediately arrested the extortion criminals. Special legislation was created to lengthen prison sentences for extortion criminals and the police were extremely exuberant in their physical handling of potential suspects.
In Greece, the police created special anti-extortion squads who operated at night and were very successful in destroying the criminal extortion networks. Immediate physical response by the squads made it known that extortion would not be tolerated.
In Karachi, Pakistan, the police, armed with the intelligence provided by the victims of extortion, the criminals involved in these crimes were dealt with in the most severe fashion, they were shot dead. Extortion immediately disappeared from those districts.
In the United States, extortion and protection rackets, were stopped in many areas of US cities by police patrols day and night, Federal efforts in bribing various Mafia families to quit the extortion racket and turning their heads away from gambling and drug dealing and specialized anti-extortion officers who were specialists in every type of endeavor that would destroy the criminal extortion rackets. The RICO act aided in wiping out the wealth and possessions of the Mafia families involved in extortion crime. The police patrols were very effective for the ordinary citizen.
Many countries around the world were successful in organizing special anti-extortion squads, who were able to develop the trust needed for the necessary intelligence to be provided to them by victims of the extortion. Any corruption by the squads resulted immediately in a break of that trust. Members of the squads were intensely vetted and charges of corruption were immediately investigated.
Mexico has no excuses. Every class of people in Mexico deserve the protection and large corporations have to begun involved in supporting anti-extortion efforts with money and resources, also including the Federal government. A show of force now and then will not solve this problem at all. It can be combatted with a genuine expansions of anti-extortion police units and long term protection plans for all the victims of extortion. Corruption is the real ugly head and the government has to get their head out of their ass when their only solution to combat this crime is a cashless society. Because extortion is a social cancer it can grow into a problem that can only be solved by massive societal violence. If the problem is continually ignored, then the Duterte/Bukele solution will be the only solution capable to destroying this cancer.
Great intervention here, and you are ahead of the game of where I am going with the series, what the experience is in other countries and how Mexico has failed to stop this. A big point indeed is corruption, and agreed if they keep on failing to provide security then eventually people could turn to a strongman who will deliver. Great incites into Greece, Pakistan, Italy and other places here.
Fully agree. Mexico is at a tipping point and if the government doesn’t frontally eliminate these people, then only a strongman like Bukele would be able to do something — along with all the rights trampling, corruption, and dictator delusion that would accompany it.
I think Bukele has already changed the game of what governments can do - like the way that the Mexican government transferred cartel bosses into U.S. custody without an extradition process - but I hope Mexico can resolve this problem without getting to that level of mass incarceration...
Agree. It's sometimes easy to get carried away by the quick success of these strongmen, but it comes at a great cost.
I was a bit too neutral about Bukele at first, but after reading this article I realized just how big of a trade-off it was for the Salvadorans: https://beta.elfaro.net/titulares/el-exilio-nos-alcanza?utm_campaign=r.latam-newsletter&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=8/10/2026&utm_id=2223074
I mean, most people care much more about individual safety than freedom of press, but it's sad that over there they were so inept that a dictator had to rescue them.
I think Mexico has enough talent and brainpower to come up with a solution, but too many incompetent and spineless people have been in power for so long that now I'm unsure if there's a way without getting to the extremes.
Yep, I should perhaps interview some of the Salvador dissidents on this…
great article. My uncle had a house in the hills above Acapulco. I visited it once. It has an absolutely beautiful view of the bay. It seemed like paradise. However, with the increase in crime, he stopped going. He wanted to sell it, but couldn't get a price he wanted, because there were no buyers, so he donated it to charity. From what I hear Puerto Vallarta, Tulum, and even Cabo are now having foreigners abandon them slowly as they become the new Acapulcos.
Yeah, Tulum has been a disaster the last cuppa of years. Puerto Vallarta is heavily gangster but I think the cartel there at least keeps it calm and Cabos is a bit more shielded. But they are all vulnerable and Acapulco needs to be a warning sign. Hope your uncle at least had some good times in that house back in the day!
Yeah it was a non stop hedonism back in the day or so I'm told. Wine, women, and song.lol
Would love to go through a time Machine and be in Acapulco in like 1963 - and being rich in that scenario would help!
As for Elvis' Hollywood version of Acapulco, circa 1963 (After watching the clip linked below, it's clear the "King" shamelessly ripped off "Jalisco" for the melody of "his" song. Now THAT surely was a crime!) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSH5PNCOjAo
Ha ha. Elvis and the Four Amigos. That really shows a world of yesteryear. To be honest, I would guess Mexicans of the time loved to see it...
Hits close to home, literally. I did look at how Harfuch's strategies differ to counter cartel BS depending on which cartel, what area, and their particular activity specialty. Fascinating. Not a "one size fits all" approach at all!
True that. Acapulco has been a bad case for many years - but different dynamic from Mazatlan, or from Cancun for that matter...
During the first 25 years of my life or so I would go with my family to Acapulco at least three times a year. I have family there. It is a gorgeous place, and my all-time favorite city. It breaks my heart that such a pearl can be left to rot under the siege of a group of young, violent, angry men with no morals — as if tropical incompetence and corruption weren’t enough. Damn guerrerenses, they ruined Guerrero.
Yeah, it is crazy how so few people can fuck things up for so many - although it takes a weak corrupt state to allow that to happen. I am glad you have great memories from there and hope there will be some more to come.
What’s your take on how the damage done by hurricanes Otis and Erick along with the AMLO admin’s response has made all of this worse?
I know some that have complained about the scrapping of the natural disaster fund and because of that people were more or less getting paid enough to leave instead of areas being rebuilt. The criminals likely enjoy having plenty of abandoned buildings to use for nefarious purposes too.
Yeah, I probably should have got into the hurricanes as well, at least in a mention. They really hammered the city and made things a lot worse, and yeah the gangs certainly took advantage of that, including in organized looting during the disaster.
A friend was there for a conference and was staying in the Princess Mundo Imperial when Otis hit. I have no idea how they didn’t end up in the central lobby with all the other furniture.
My favorite hotel in Acapulco that one. And yep, there were even images of cars that had been blown inside the hotel.
Ioan, once again you have handed me a plot for a Detective Emilia Cruz novel. You touched on a crucial point, which is recruitment. The poorest neighborhoods, so far from the glitz and money of the bay hotels, are an endless source of new recruits and social connections are already in place. Garcia Harfuch can't just arrest, he has to replace the recruitment cycle with economic alternatives.
That will be one to look out for! Yep, they need the carrot and the stick both to be working to break the cycle - and it takes a change of mentality for those recruits to want to work and not go for the temptation of the gang life...
It seems like recruiting has been impacted though? There is so much talk and evidence of forced recruitment by the CJNG and Sinaloans that it seems like the cartels are having trouble hiring. Otherwise they wouldn't have to coerce and force so many young men into their ranks!
Very good point. However, it can be different to a guy wanting to be a gang member and making money selling drugs or just taking cash from a business (plenty of recruits for that) to someone going to fight in a crazy battlefield where there is very high chance of dying (throw in the forced recruits there...).
Yes, this is not a situation with either job security or a dental plan . . .